Bruno Maderna

The 1940s: in search of a language

In 1940 at the age of twenty, Bruno Maderna graduated from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Music in Rome, where he had spent three years studying composition with the severe Alessandro Bustini. During this period, he composed one of his first works: Alba (1939) for alto voice and string orchestra. The piece sets a text by Vincenzo Cardarelli, a poet of twilight, anxiety, and despair, for whom life was a constant vigil: a solitary, endless waiting for something that had not yet taken place. The text of Alba belongs to this aesthetic world, but it also reveals a rare moment in which the poet seems to have found a sliver of peace. The young Maderna keeps to these themes. While many different images appear in Cardarelli’s poem, Maderna’s musical treatment of them is uniform. In this setting, the duality between voice and orchestra emerges only rarely, as if to symbolize an existential dichotomy that would only fully emerge in the 1960s. The intensity of this composition recalls Puccini, Barber, Hindemith, or Bartók.

After completing his degree in composition, Maderna returned to Venice and wrote his first Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1941). The work premiered on 22 June 1942 at the Benedetto-Marcello Conservatory. Long thought lost, the complete score was later discovered in Verona in the papers of Bianca Cohen, a friend of Maderna’s at the time it was composed. In 1946, Maderna transcribed the concerto for two pianos. The ten-minute work reveals the freedom and spontaneity that shaped Maderna’s early style: one hears Ravel’s refined, coloristic impressionism, Stravinsky’s experimental rhythm, Bartók’s harmonic-modal stacked fourths, and the influence of Hindemith, whose treatise, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, was a major influence on Maderna. Jazz, which Maderna played during his years in Rome, also leaves its mark. What stands out most strongly, however, is the sense of a young composer pushing beyond his academic training and into a need to embrace something else. Throughout the 1940s, he continued to search for a personal language and technique. Although he collaborated with Gian Francesco Malipiero on critical editions of Venetian baroque music, he remained wary of neoclassical poetics and formal models.

Two compositions, both from 1946, illustrate the stylistic diversity of this period: Liriche su Verlaine for voice and piano and Requiem for soloists, choir, and orchestra with strings, brass, and three pianos. In Liriche su Verlaine, Maderna translates the spirituality and passion of Verlaine’s poetry into music, drawing on French impressionism through lyricism and a subtle range of timbres in both the vocal and piano parts. The Requiem, in contrast, is a monumental musical and existential response to the Second World War and its destruction. It also reveals the breadth of Maderna’s musical knowledge, with references that range from Venetian choral traditions, Hindemith, and Stravinsky to French sacred music by Fauré, Duruflé, and Poulenc, the choral writing of Romantic opera, and the music of Malipiero. Toward the end of the 1940s during a conducting master class he attended with Luigi Nono, Maderna encountered Hermann Scherchen and was inspired to make a sharp turn to serialism. The friendship and shared musical ties of the three musicians led both Maderna and Nono to embrace twelve-tone writing and, eventually, to develop their own forms of serial technique across different parameters.

Having begun by exploring established serialist procedures, Maderna then developed his own approach to serialism. Following the example of Luigi Dallapiccola, with whom he maintained both a friendship and an artistic relationship, he blended serial methods with traditional canonic and contrapuntal techniques. This approach produced several major works, including Tre liriche greche (1948) for soprano, choir, and instruments, Fantasia e fuga (B.A.C.H. Variationen, 1948) for two pianos, and Studi per “Il Processo” di Franz Kafka (1950) for soprano, narrator, and orchestra.

The 1950s: strict serialism and electroacoustic experimentation

During the 1950s, Maderna’s work centered on two main interests. On one hand, he developed his serial technique while defining an “expressive” understanding of this approach to music. On the other, he pursued technological and electroacoustic music research with Luciano Berio at the RAI Studio of Phonology in Milan. Musica su due dimensioni (1952) for flute and tape was the first “mixed” musical composition in the history of Western music. It places the acoustic traditional instrument in dialogue with technology. The central question was how to balance these two very different musical sources. Maderna answered by building the electroacoustic part from taped and transformed flute sounds. The result is a kind distorted mirror, an alter ego for the flute, echoed in a manner that elicits unease. At the time, this unease had a real cultural charge, since electronic music was widely perceived as a threat to traditional music — a threat that Maderna clearly did not find credible.

In contrast to the abstract, geometrical interpretation of strict serialism imparted by a “distorted” reading of Webern’s late work, Maderna’s approach was more discursive, full of extramusical references: philosophical, political, social, and cultural. Beyond merely developing compositional technique, he reached for something that teased out cultural and political implications in a much broader sense. He drew on ideas about art and culture that Antonio Gramsci had explored in his political writing and his letters. These ideas resonated strongly with both Maderna and Nono. For them, even music produced through complex and esoteric techniques, and therefore marked by a high degree of technical and formal refinement, could still denounce injustice and express civic, social, and ethical values. One example is Vier Briefe (1953), a cantata for soprano, bass, and orchestra based on four letters: one from a Resistance fighter awaiting execution, one from a sales representative, one from Kafka to Milena Jesenská, and one from Gramsci to his wife, Julia Schucht. The work follows the model of composition as testimony, as pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg in A Survivor from Warsaw. Vier Briefe later inspired Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso (1956), which draws on letters written by members of the Resistance across Europe as they awaited execution.

Throughout the 1950s, Maderna deepen his understanding of the technical and expressive possibilities of electroacoustic and electronic music. The RAI Studio of Phonology, which he founded with Berio, developed a distinctive approach based on recorded acoustic sounds, both instrumental and vocal. This set it apart from the GRM in Paris, led by (Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry), which focused on concrete sounds, and from the Studio for Electronic Music of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, where Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert explored the synthesis of new sounds especially through the manipulation of pitch. Maderna’s most significant works from this period are Notturno (1956), Syntaxis (1957), and Continuo (1958), which transforms a single flute sound. This phase of electroacoustic exploration culminates in Dimensioni II - Invenzioni su una voce (1960). For this work, the experimental writer and composer Hans G. Helms created a linguistically inspired text made of phonemes. Cathy Berberian performed the vocal material, which Maderna then processed and fixed on tape.

The 1960s and 1970s: musical theater, melody, chance, form

In Hyperion, Maderna set his hand to creating a new kind of musical theater. He moved away from the age-old understandings of psychology and narrative conventions that had long underpinned traditional musical theater, drawing instead on Schoenberg’s teachings, Berg’s expressive theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s “situational” approach to epic theater. Hyperion is not an opera in the traditional sense, but rather a musical universe in progress: a majestic, shifting tapestry composed of multiple scores, which took a different form in the stage and concert versions that Maderna produced from 1964 to 1970. Its poetic and dialectical core comes from Friedrich Hölderlin’s epistolary novel. Maderna translates that source into a tension between a subject, represented by the flute, and external reality, represented by the orchestra and electronics. Represented in words, the work asks what function art can serve, and what role can artists play in postindustrial society.

Melody is essential here, symbolizing subjectivity in crisis. Maderna calls this lyrical idea aulodia: a monodic song for reed instrument, a distant memory of the Greek aulos. In his musical imagination, the modern flute and oboe carry this lyrical ideal forward. They draw out an archetypical melody, mirroring the harmony between humanity and nature, and reflecting a beauty that no longer exists, as in Concerto No. 1 for Oboe (1963), Concerto for Violin (1969), and Grande Aulodia (1970) for flute, oboe, and orchestra. The drama of Hyperion plays out in the music itself, as it does in Don Perlimplin (1960), a radio drama in which the protagonist, played again by the flute, communicates only through sound, not words.

The second half of the 1960s saw Maderna produce a remarkable series of orchestral scores, along with concertos for solo instruments. These show his mastery of composition and orchestration, as well as conducting, which he was perfecting during this same period. Many of these scores refine his approach to micro-form, complex timbre, chance, or grouping techniques. Examples include Concerto No. 2 for Oboe and Orchestra (1967), Quadrivium (1969) for four percussionists and four orchestral groups, Aura (1972) for orchestra, Biogramma (1972) for large orchestra, and Ausstrahlung (1971) for female vocalist, flute, oboe, large orchestra, and tape, after Indian and Persian poems.

In his last works, Maderna developed a distinctive chance-based technique that gave macro-form a modular, virtual character: with each performance, the composition could begin anew. He transposed compositional principles normally associated with microstructure, such as the permutation of tones, to the larger scale of formal organization. The most exemplary pieces in this vein are Venetian Journal (1972), Concerto No. 3 for Oboe and Orchestra (1973), and Satyricon (1973). This shift was possible in part because Maderna often served as the chief interpreter of his own music. In performance, he could extend the compositional process, allowing the work to take shape in one of its many possible forms. In these pieces, chance does not negate form, but rather reveals and intensifies it.